Cross-country Employment Propensity of Finnish Migrants: Evidence from Linked Register Data

Abstract

This paper explores how individual employment propensity interrelates across countries and time, using data that link population registers from Sweden and Finland. Migrants are observed before emigration, after emigration, and in a follow-up in cases both where they were still living in the host country and if they had return migrated. The interrelation is found to be strong, suggesting that migrants’ employment problems need not necessarily be due to failures in integration policies or because of problems in assimilation induced by migration as an event. They could also be explained by the fact that many persons, in latent subgroups, have inherently elevated failure risks.